Director: S.J. Clarkson
Writers: Matt Sazama, Burk Sharpless, Claire Parker
Stars: Dakota Johnson, Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced
Synopsis: Cassandra Webb is a New York metropolis paramedic who begins to demonstrate signs of clairvoyance. Forced to challenge revelations about her former, she needs to safeguard three young women from a deadly adversary who wants them destroyed.
Madame Web has some of the most blatant and awful product placement we have seen since Keanu Reeves and Jennifer Connelly pulled up to a McDonald’s parking lot to try their new line of coffee known as the McCafe in The Day the Earth Stood Still. So, you can’t help but be confused about whether to thank the Pepsi-Cola corporation, blame them, or feel bad for them.
They stop short of Bill Cosby opening up a can of Coke in the center frame of Ghost Dad and replying with “ahh” to signify refreshment. No, the studio has the filmmakers have the product placement practically be the hero of the story in defeating a foe, which is so outlandish that you can’t help but be impressed with the courage to sink the comic book genre to an all-time low.
This is the fourth film in the spectacular downfall of Sony’s Spider-Man Universe. The resounding thud of Madame Web has inspired me to start a petition for the studio never to make another SSU film again. S.J. Clarkson (Anatomy of a Scandal) directed this gigantic cinematic cliche. She co-wrote the script with Claire Parker, who took over the suicide mission from the Morbius writing team, Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless. The result is a bloated episode of the television series Heroes with the leads sleepwalking through their roles.
The story follows Cassie Webb (Dakota Johnson), a paramedic living her most average life in New York City. She and her partner, Ben (Adam Scott), drive around, saving lives. Cassie was an orphan because her mother, Constance (Halt and Catch Fire’s Kerry Bishe), died looking for a spider in the rainforest that cures hundreds of diseases.
The twist is that she travels while pregnant with Cassie. When she locates the predatory arachnid, her guide, Ezekiel (Napoleon’s Tahar Rahim), takes the eight-legged freak for himself. Constance is shot, but an indigenous Peruvian tribe can deliver the baby, but not before biting Cassie’s mom, which gives her clairvoyant powers that have remained dormant until now.
She then has visions of three teenagers who are going to be kill a demonically dressed Spider-Man. One is the daughter of a woman, the shy Julia (superstar Sydney Sweeney) who Cassie saved. Another is Anya (Isabell Merced), who lives in Cassie’s building. The final one is punk rock skateboarding chick Mattie (Selah and the Spades’s Celeste O’Connor), who gave Cassie the middle finger after she stopped her ambulance from running her over during oncoming traffic.
There’s simply no rhyme or reason for almost anything that happens in Madame Web. For one, the four female characters coming together have no real reason for existing other than to sell you diabetes and dementia-causing fizzy water and steal your hard-earned money at theatrical prices. The attempted backstory connecting Cassie and Sims to the teenagers is inexplicably lazy.
So are the head-scratching time cuts. Cassie can travel to a jungle in Peru to talk to members of the Las Arañas tribe. Yet, Cassie comes back the same day, over 3652 miles a few hours later, to help Ben defend the girls who have no reason to be part of the story, to begin with, other than to spark a franchise for Sweeny, who has little to do in the movie in the first place.
There’s no backstory to establish Rahim’s villainous character, not even during his jaw-droppingly bad exposition scene with Jill Hennessy’s unnamed NSA agent. That scene defines what’s wrong with Madame Web. Sims repeats the story endlessly. That’s the same device used consistently with Johnson’s titular character.
However, the scenes are so poorly put together, edited, and acted with Johnson’s trademark “whispering in monotone” (thank you, Please Don’t Destroy) in a wide variety of intense situations that it’s like experiencing nails across a chalkboard repeatedly in a nightmare version of Groundhog Day. We can only pray that the rodent doesn’t see a sequel in our future.
Madame Web even squanders the fun of being an unofficial prequel to the Spider-Man franchise, where Ben is supposed to play Uncle Ben. His sister-in-law, Mary Parker (Emma Roberts), alludes to her unborn baby as the future Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield, or Tom Holland. (Considering this SSU entry quality, my money is on Garfield.)
I’m not sure what else you can say about Madame Web. The film feels like the filmmakers are working from a storyboard rather than a script because hardly anything connects individual scenes. All I know is this is my Hudson Hawk. It was one of the most painful theatrical experiences of my entire life. I owe an apology to The Marvels—one with flowers, candy, and jewelry to smooth things over.
